Bishop John Wilkins

John Wilkins chaired the founding meeting of the Royal Society and was its first
secretary. He was the only person to have been head of a college in
both Cambridge and Oxford. He was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge but
was deposed at the Restoration in 1660: he had married Oliver
Cromwell's sister, and this did not endear him to returning royalty.
He had previously been Warden of Wadham College, Oxford.

He is of interest to cryptographers because he wrote a book called
‘Mercury, or the Secret and Swift Messenger’, which is described in
David Kahn's history ‘The Codebreakers’ as ‘the first book in
English on cryptography’. It is much more than that: it is a treatise on
the state of the art in seventeenth century telegraphy.

Wilkins describes a number of optical and acoustic techniques. He
explains how the letters of the alphabet can be represented as five
bits each and then transmitted using any available means – such as two
different bells, or a musket shot for ‘0’ and a cannon shot for ‘1’.
He goes on to what may be the first systematic treatment of coding in
different number bases (binary and ternary). This technology evolved
into the chains of semaphore stations used by both Britain and France
in the Napoleonic wars, and they in turn stimulated the development of
the electric telegraph in the mid-nineteenth century. He also
speculates on whether a universal language could be constructed; this
inspired Roget's thesaurus, and (much later) Esperanto.

In passing, Wilkins explains how to protect telegraph messages against
being understood by hostile observers. As well as showing how to break
simple substitution ciphers, and introducing various geometrical
enciphering schemes, he proposes the use of nulls to make
cryptanalysis harder. He not only launches the subject of cryptology
into the English literature, but introduces the words
‘cryptographia’ and ‘cryptologia’ to the English
language. The book ends with two
pages on cryptography policy that are still pertinent today. His
conclusion is that ‘If all those useful Inventions that are liable to
abuse, should therefore be concealed, there is not any Art or Science
which might be lawfully profest’.

Here are images of page
171 and page
172, courtesy of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College,
Cambridge.

John Wilkins was born on the 1st January 1614, the son of an Oxford
watchmaker. He became an undergraduate at Magdalen Hall when he was
only 13 and graduated MA in 1634. He sided with the republican faction
becoming chaplain to a series of anti-Stuart noblemen, and wrote
`Mercury' in 1641 at the age of 27. The Civil War broke out the
following year, and when it ended in 1648 he was made Warden of Wadham
College, a former royalist stronghold in Oxford. Although this was a
political appointment – he was awarded his doctorate only the
following year – he proved to be an able and vigorous academic,
writing on a huge range of practical topics ranging from the design of
submarines to the possibility of travel to the moon. His mission in
life was to demolish the Aristotlean view of the world and usher in an
age of experimental reason. The meetings of experimental scientists he
held in Wadham during the 1650s made the college one of the scientific
foci of Europe and later developed into the Royal Society. This was
the honeymoon period of Western science. As the shackles of classical
scholarship fell away, everything seemed possible for a while – until
Newton spoiled the fun by discovering inertia in 1667.

Although Wilkins married Cromwell's sister Robina in 1656, his
appointment at Trinity in 1659 was at the demand of the fellowship
there, and his subsequent sacking by Charles the Second was strongly
protested by them. He then became Secretary of the Royal Society and,
in 1668, having made his peace with the King, finally became Bishop of
Chester. He died on the 19th November 1672.

The most comprehensive online reference on Wilkins is in Wikipedia; an essay by
Jorge Luis Borges focuses on work he did on universal language (which is
still cited in scientific publications in our own age.) The other online
source of which I'm aware is here - part of a series of web pages on the history of mathematics.

My main sources for this page were the Dictionary of
National Biography, vol LXI pp 264-7 (which has a list of primary sources);
`Wadham College' by CSL Davies and J Garnett (1994, ISBN
1-85967-022-9); and his `official' biography, `John Wilkins
1614-1672', by Barbara Shapiro, University of California Press, 1969
(which rather focuses on the theological and political aspects of his
life).